A world filled with great social and technological change, religious uncertainty, and a desire for ritual and deeper faith in the midst of a disenchanted, overstimulating society: All of these seem like issues of the twenty-first century. But they are also tensions that affected Victorian Britain, leading to the rise of the Oxford Movement in the 1830s. These young and devout intellectuals expressed dismay at the apathy of the Anglican establishment and its lukewarm response to the upheaval of an increasingly anxious and secular world. They eventually exerted significant influence, transforming the religious landscape in Britain, revitalizing old rituals and practices, and even renewing interest in celebrating lapsed Christmas festivities.

In medieval times, large feasts and other jovial Christmas celebrations were the norm, as demonstrated in poems like the fourteenth-century Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. Merriment existed alongside reverent religious devotion to the miracle of Christ’s birth: The two were not considered oppositional. Christmas carols such as “In Dulci Jubilo” and “Good King Wenceslas” symbolized this connection between communal joviality and religious spirit. But the more radical manifestations of the Reformation in Britain strained this connection. Puritanical factions claimed many Christmas traditions were pagan blasphemy. This anti-Christmas sentiment reached a fever pitch after Oliver Cromwell took power in 1653 during the English Civil War and his Commonwealth government banned the celebration of Christmas. This ban lasted only as long as the Cromwell regime, and Christmas officially returned with the restoration of the Stuart kings in 1660. But celebrations remained relatively muted.

The Oxford Movement played a significant role in restoring Christmas to a central place in nineteenth-century British religious life. As Bishop Geoffrey Rowell wrote, this was largely due to the movement’s focus on “the revival and enrichment of the Prayer Book forms of service, and a proper observance of the seasons and festivals of the church calendar.” The thinkers of the Oxford Movement, such as John Keble, Edward Pusey, and, perhaps most famously, John Henry Newman, were interested in revitalizing forgotten rites and rituals in Britain. Though they took great inspiration from the distant past of Christianity and reverently studied the early Church Fathers, they were not antiquarians who lived in a bubble apart from the concerns of their age. Quite the opposite: They vividly addressed the question of how Christianity and specifically the Anglican church should respond to the lukewarm beliefs and religious apathy they saw as characteristic of the nineteenth century.